World War II Was Many Wars In One

By Mary-Alice Waters, The Militant, Vol.59, No.20, 22
May 1995

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of World War
II. Touted as the war against fascism, governments around the world
are holding grand commemorations of this imperialist slaughter of
working people.

The following excerpt, taken from Washington's Third
Militarization Drive in New International no. 7, explains the truth
behind the war that left as many as 60 million human beings dead. This
excerpt is reprinted with permission of New International. Subheads
are by the Militant.

Contrary to popular belief both then and now, World War II was not a
war to stop fascism. It was much more complex than that; it was at
least three wars in one, as the SWP [Socialist Workers Party]
explained at the time.

It was an interimperialist war in which the defeat by Washington and
its allies of Germany, Japan, and Italy did nothing to eliminate the
economic and social roots of fascism nor the causes of imperialist
oppression. Fascism, the most virulent form of maintaining imperialist
rule, will again attempt to raise its head in any period of deep
capitalist crisis and accelerating class polarization and combat.

It was a war to roll back the Russian revolution and reestablish
capitalism in the Soviet Union. With enormous sacrifice the workers
and peasants of the first and at that time only workers' state
turned the tide against German imperialism's invading armies. They
prevented the imperialist powers from realizing this historic
objective, which none of them have ever abandoned from October 1917 to
this day.

It was a multifront war for national liberation in which the colonized
and oppressed nations of the world took good advantage of the
interimperialist conflict to advance their interests from India to
China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea, the Mideast, Ireland, and Québec.

A fourth war also took shape as the imperialist bloodletting
continued: the war carried out by resistance forces—many
organized by the workers' movement—in the occupied countries
of Europe. That was a war against the fascist dictatorships imposed by
Hitler's National Socialist movement. It was also a war by the
workers to create the most favorable possible conditions for the
working classes in Europe to emerge victorious over their own
bourgeoisies, whether fascist or democratic imperialist, as the
conflict unfolded.

‘We are going home’

After Japan's surrender in August 1945, the U.S. rulers, who came
out on top of the pile in 1945, found themselves confronted with a
disintegrating army. Workers and farmers in uniform, particularly
those in the Pacific theater, demanded to be brought home
immediately. They saw no reason to stay in uniform once the war they
were fighting, the war against fascism, had been won.

The rulers in Washington, however, wanted to reap the harvest of
victory over their rivals by taking control of Asia. In particular,
they aimed at keeping China under imperialist control. As GIs
throughout Asia started demonstrating by the thousands, the Democrats
and Republicans in Washington howled, But we are losing China!

The GIs answered, You may be losing China. We are going home!
They simply refused to continue under arms. Demobilization was
accelerated and go home they did, by the millions. The U.S. armed
forces had ceased to be an effective fighting force for imperialist
interests.

That's how the postwar period began in the United States: with a
GI going-home movement that no class on earth could have stopped, as
well as a massive strike wave that brought nearly two million workers,
many of them newly returned vets, onto the picket lines demanding an
immediate end to the wartime wage controls.

New militarization drive

In response to the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II, the
advance of the colonial revolution as the imperialist powers warred
against each other, and the resulting shift in the international
relationship of forces to the detriment of imperialism, Washington had
to take steps to put back together a military force to use against
struggles by workers and peasants around the world. With World War II
barely over, the U.S. rulers needed a new militarization drive.

At the same time, the employers still had to housebreak the labor
movement that had been born in the giant struggles of the rise of the
CIO industrial union movement in the second half of the 1930s. They
also had to try to prevent a massive movement for Black equality from
arising on the basis of the civil rights militancy that had emerged
during the war. The witch-hunt and anticommunist reaction of the end
of the 1940s and the 1950s were aimed at accomplishing these goals.